The present invention relates to a vehicle cornering lamp system in which the direction of illumination of headlamps is changed as the steering wheel of the vehicle is turned.
The direction of illumination of automotive headlamps is usually fixed so that light is applied to objects located directly ahead of the vehicle. When, however, the vehicle travels around a curve, such headlamps cannot sufficiently illuminate objects located in the actual path of the vehicle. That is, during travel on curved roads and in cornering, objects located in the path of the vehicle may not sufficiently be illuminated by the headlamps.
In order to overcome this difficulty, recently a cornering lamp system has been proposed in which the direction of illumination of a headlamp is changed as the steering wheel is turned so that objects located in the path of the vehicle are sufficiently illuminated.
The conventional cornering lamp system is generally a mechanical cornering lamp system in which a steering wheel operating mechanism and a direction-of-illumination changing mechanism are mechanically coupled to each other so that the direction of illumination of the headlamp is linearly changed so as to track the steering angle. Such a system is unavoidably intricate in arrangement, and suffers from the difficulty that a different design is required for each type of vehicle with which the system is to be employed, that is, different cornering lamp systems must be provided for different types of vehicles. Furthermore, since the steering wheel operating mechanism and the direction-of-illumination changing mechanism are mechanically coupled to each other, the operation of changing the direction of illumination is carried out even in the daytime, which reduces the service of the system.